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I’m sitting here at 5 PM on the night before Thanksgiving, musing. I’ve just finished working on various things — my game, my business, and my job search. Its interesting to me that I’m forced to do both business and job search simultaneous. It seems that they should be polar opposites, yet the problem is that my business(es) aren’t financially stable enough to support me on a full time basis. There are all these opportunities, yet none of them seem to ‘finish’. They’re nebulous and closing my fingers around their ever moving target seems to be difficult. The same goes for my job search.. I seem not to be able to “close” in on the right position, the open opportunity that fits my needs and my wishes. It makes it difficult for me to figure out what I need to be doing.

The game, at least, makes sense. When I am able to dedicate time and effort to it, it thrives and is extremely successful. People enjoy it and there is a sense of vigor. My dad’s always asked me, ever since I started playing around with online communities and providing service, “Why can’t you figure out how to make a living that way?”. Its a good question. It even begs an answer … I wish I could answer it. I’ve figured out ways to make a few thousand dollars a year from a single game — I don’t think that would be a problem. But there’s no way that I can live off of a few thousand. Much less pay back the time that it would take to develop up front. Maybe I can figure out how to develop the up front and then adapt it, cookie-cutter-style, to simply copy it. Ten times a few thousand may be worth it. But then you run into competition such as World of Warcraft, Stormreach, and Everquest…

In any case, the end of the year is when I truly start to run into problems, so I’m hoping that hope, perseversence and a little bit of luck will help me for 2007.

Something that crosses the boundaries of people attending school, working full time, and homemakers … Time Management.

The skills necessary to successfully navigate the dangers of making sure that you have time enough to accomplish that with is necessary.

The patience needed to deal with everything that comes flying at you from every which direction.

The knowledge that if you do not have both the skills and the patience, your life will end!

Well, more seriously, your life will not end, but perhaps its continued existance will be more difficult. I have been running into these problems lately. Whether it is due to my personal lack of time management skills or, more likely, simply due to too much to do within the available amount of time is not relevant, but what has occurred is that I barely have enough time to handle most of my responsibilities.

My average day currently consists of:

6:30 AM: Awaken and get ready to go to work
7:00 AM: Check business email and respond as necessary
7:30 AM: Leave for work
8:30 AM: Arrive at current contract
4:00 PM: Leave for home
4:45 PM: Arrive home, greet wife and child, help with necessary things around the house
5:00 PM: Check business email, voicemail and handle additional problems that have arisen throughout the day
6:00 PM: Shop for dinner, either cook or play with son, eat dinner
7:30 PM: Do homework
9:00 PM: Look for full time work by checking web boards, contacting personal network, etc
9:30 PM: Check Online Communities for fires
10:00 PM: Put son to bed
10:30 PM: Finish homework / business
12:00 AM: Go to bed
1:00 AM: Probably fall asleep 😉

Its no wonder that I don’t have time to do anything else or spend a great deal of time with my wife anymore. Eventually, I’ll figure this out an, hopefully, be able to get things more organized. Suggestions are welcome. ;P At least when this contract is over, I’ll have more time again — granted, I will be back to the more difficult side of trying to make sure I can find away to generate a strong (and stable) enough income!

In theory, it has this capability where your email address will be anonymous so that you can post without spam spiders finding your address and then using it for their own nefarious means. Its supposed to cover your tracks and people send to jobs-424183723@craigslist.org which then forwards to your home address. Sweet! This means I can post job openings, resumes, ads, etc without having to worry about Mr. Spider running across my email and locating it.

WRONG.

I have an email address.. we’ll call it jobs@smallbuzinesscompany.com for fun. So I post with jobs@smallbuzinesscompany.com, mark it anonymous, and wait for the resumes. Do I get resumes? Sure. I get a couple. Excellent. Craigslist is doing what its supposed to be doing. Perfect.

A week later. Ms. Kaitlin sends me an email.

“hunggry mouthful of speermnot” as the subject line.

On my jobs@ email account. That isn’t a member of ANY mailing list, ANY clubs, or ANY outside location other than my website (which has been up for six months without gaining spam) and Craigslist as an anonymous poster.